on facing the Have

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

Tags

2018, 7*, being, block, blue, bone, cause and effect, change, choice, clothes, clouds, Darwin, death, depth, discipline, doing, dream, drifting, economics, emerald, extermination, faces, government, green, grey, hats, Have, head, hills, hinge, humanity, identity, iron, kiss, life, loss, making, mud, music, neck, peacock, photography, power, quotidian, river, roof, settlement, shadow, Shrewsbury, slow, society, statue, stone, streets, tectonic plates, time, trees, violence, walls, war, watching, water, woman, World War, writing

bone to stone drifting
catastrophic slow

lee to face-ward drifting
shadow to quotidian

suggesting life
only when settled

under branch of roof;
noticeable change

comes at the price
of sheild and pike:

death-mask disciplined
to the painted face

open to the very depth
of loss, later settled

to economies of
plea, barter and

proliferation of fact
artisaned superfluous

to being – faces fixed
in leer the rest of

born days, where
animals are skinned

under abnegated face,
where stone walls

turn green, staining
clothing and where the

emerald poise of head
and neck watches

the peck of open flay, all
“exterminated by

slow acting and still
existing causes …”

… time begins
to tick – well it had to

start somewhere – and
with time cometh writing

and with writing the
topography fades from

hill-wide face to
pock-mark street and settlement

all fitted ingeniously
with raised wall over arch,

high to unresolved descant
always left in minor;

the woman bends
to the laundry before

the rush of water
released from the mill:

power is only explicit
when blocked and

channelled, tree to
gable with date

and signature, silk
to valence with

drape of repose and spreading peacock dream;
so, is there choice

of governance: cut
through from neck to child;

you stay unnatural-still
your image will be caught,

you turn, and your
head will disappear,

you climb the wall
and stand still, you

stay in the mud yard
and stand still, … only

hats stay constant, cast-
iron flanges reach

from cast-circular
hinges, woven to corset,

slave to youth; the
memorial stone,

painfully-carved,
reflects the blue

of grey cloud, under
posts of wire

the death-etched
face stoops to kiss

the face of
wholly mud

291218 – spent the afternoon at the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery to tread time from immemorial to the First World War; the quote is from “Thinking Path” by Shirley Chubb (2004), an exhibition that explores the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, an artwork and series of installations inspired by Darwin’s daily ritual of walking the same path at Down House; “Shadow Stories”, an animated short film by Samantha Moore is not directly referenced but weaves about the whole perambulation; references include the Roman conquest, medieval, Civil War, and industrial exhibits, up to the Open Art Exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the First World War

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & clouds & doing & identity & power wormhole: The Passage of the St. Gothard, 1804
blue & woman wormhole: SPRING AND ALL XI by William Carlos Williams
change & streets wormhole: to let be
death wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
dream wormhole: THURSDAY by William Carlos Williams
economics & society & walls & war wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
faces wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
green & shadow & trees & writing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees
grey & time wormhole: La Route de Louveciennes, 1870
Have wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
life wormhole: ‘… and yet I think I am so modest: …’
music wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams
river wormhole: quiet river
roof wormhole: breakfast
stone wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
water wormhole: SPRING AND ALL I by William Carlos Williams

Open – All – Ours

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2017, 8*, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, brown, buildings, clouds, dedication, echo, generation, identity, land, lifetimes, living, Mahayana, Open All Hours, pocket, punya, rain, Shantideva, sky, smile, stone, tectonic plates, true nature, work

Open – All – Ours

out across the vast land
of all of my many lives

what started as a stave-
shack has long-since

become a stone colossus
wider than the sky in which

my own clouds rain,
with openings measureless

to man and tectonic plates
stacked up and arching

in inconceivable echo;
that’s where we all work,

life after life, all by my-selves
meticulously stocking up

even anything so small,
taking whole lifetimes

sometimes to place a
single smile in its right

and proper place because
you never know when it

might come in handy;
well, it’s a living; do you

like my trusty brown
overcoat – nice, deep

pockets – comes with
the job, been in my

family now for so many
generations now … once

I catch up with myself

constructed out of Bodhicharyavatara, chapter three, verse ten, by Shantideva

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

brown wormhole: monument to vainglory
buildings wormhole: time
clouds wormhole: industrial estate
echo & sky wormhole: so pleased to see you again
identity & lifetimes wormhole: ‘never look up’?
living wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – agricultural show
rain wormhole: ah … // oh … // meanwhile … // … // tha ya ta …
smile wormhole: to allow / passage
stone wormhole: transmuted
work wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase

1964

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1960s, 1964, 2014, angel, archetypes, beauty, Burt Bacharach, Diane di Prima, Dionne Warwick, dream, emptiness, feeling, hair, humanity, identity, imagination, life, light, lightning, lime, Manhattan, morning, myth, reality, San Francisco, shadow, streets, table, tectonic plates, the Summer of Love, time, walking, years

1964

                           she stood up from the
                           lime-green tablecloth we bought and walked
                           down through the streets
                           between morning shadows …

you’ll never get to heaven (if you break my heart): Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Hal David; soon after I posted this I sat down and had lunch (sultanas and banana in porridge) and read the following passage which was so apropos that I just had to add it to this work; it is by Diane di Prima, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman”, the beginning of chapter 19 – I haven’t asked permission (don’t know how to), but I just wanted to share it, it’s brilliant:

Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them.   They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred.   The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’.   Or we are somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live.   Sometimes with deadly rapidity.

This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going.   Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful.   Vivid, bright, and deadly, like some tropical flowers.   Not human.   Not cut to our measure.

But we – we couldn’t see that.   Thought we were gods …

‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath: 1967 and 68.   Tip of the iceburg, if you ask me.

For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic.   It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly.   When angels, incubi, and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside.   When we see the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocery.

                                                      .

We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand we had slipped through the gap, and that Something was now pulling us in.   Pulling us under.   For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us.   What I have called the World of Archetypes.   Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us.   Without conscience and without regret.   And so beautiful!

As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha.   Or Yidam.

And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing.   And moving faster than the eye can register.   Even the eye of the mind.

Our downfall was – it was so beautiful.   For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated.   To go down in the servive of That – that was the ultimate grace.

But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informed concent.   And with, ultimate, no concern for human purpose.

And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates.   Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma.   As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape.   Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten soul stuff I have here called Archetypes.   That seeks to brek through to the surface wherever the plates are thin.

The plates were very thin in 1964.